Arthur Williams
23
September, 1914 -- 27 August, 2009

a noted psychiatrist and psychoanalyst whose pioneering work
with offenders, including murderers, influenced generations of
forensic clinicians.

Arthur Williams was a noted psychiatrist and psychoanalyst whose
pioneering work with offenders, including murderers, influenced
generations of forensic clinicians.

Born during the onset of World War One in Birkenhead, he spent his
childhood on the Wirral where he developed a passionate love of
nature. At the age of 13 he visited Liverpool Museum where he
discovered its large collection of butterflies, and was encouraged
by the museum . This inspired him to want to train to become a
zoologist. Later, he felt torn between this wish and a calling to
study medicine. A scholarship to study medicine settled the matter.
From medicine he went on to train in psychiatry and then at the
Institute of Psychoanalysis in London.
He was Melanie Klein’s last patient prior to her death.
His original inspiration to study psychoanalysis was Jonathan
Hanaghan, Dublin’s first psychoanalyst, who had earlier lived on
Merseyside and who held evening discussions on the subject at his
house which the young Arthur attended. There, an inner course was
set that led to a career that spanned 60 years of exploration of the
disturbed mind.
He influenced a great many clinicians and psychotherapists working
with pre-psychotic and highly disturbed adolescents, in addition to
his work in the forensic clinical field. He was a distinguished
Chairman of the Adolescent Dept at the Tavistock Clinic in London in
the early years of its existence. A typical phrase that he used to
describe the predicament of many failing adolescents who came to the
clinic was that they were in thrall to the 'false Gods of
drugs, drink and delinquency', which he considered could be used to
evade necessary psychic pain at the cost of psychological
development.
Professor
Christopher Cordess recalls inviting him to undertake specialist
consultation to an adolescent forensic case conference at the
Maudsley Hospital. It was a remarkable meeting because the Chairman,
out of courtesy, asked Arthur to give his opinion first: such was
the profundity, sympathy and clarity of Arthur’s
Kleinian-influenced formulation, that the senior Maudsley clinicians
present had little of interest to add. This enormously impressed the
trainees, of whom Cordess himself was one. Later, Williams and
Cordess were to co-author a highly influential article entitled
'The Criminal Act and Acting Out', in 'Forensic Psychotherapy –
crime, psychotherapy and the offender patient'.

Many trainees in supervision with Arthur came to appreciate his
emotional warmth, generosity and professional modesty. His
pioneering treatment of men detained in HMP Wormwood Scrubs, where
he worked over a number of years, achieved remarkable results. He
developed a special method of analysis and reconstruction of the
homicidal act: in particular, the explosive, sudden catastrophic
type of homicide in which the arousal at the time of the killing
frequently produced amnesia for the circumstances of the event and
its precursors. His aim was to help the individuals face the reality
of what they had done to enable them to have a more genuine remorse
and an understanding of the enormity and irreversibility of
killing. He was aware that they could never make full reparation
for their act of killing and that this truth, when it came home to
them, could precipitate a risk of suicide or overwhelming
depression. For Williams, helping these lost individuals manage
their guilt and anxiety was a great deal more creative than
punishment or preaching.

His innovative theoretical model included both historical theories
of memory recovery based on the early work of Freud and the
psychologist Pierre Janet, and anticipated some of the recent
developments on traumatic stress, including amnesia, of shocking
events as an unconscious avoidance mechanism. He used Klein’s
theories of psychotic mental mechanisms to help his patients
incorporate undesirable and repudiated aspects of themselves as part
of the recovery process. He advanced the view that catastrophic
homicide was often dependent on a final significant event that
short-circuited a constellation of traumatic experiences so that an
otherwise successful defensive organisation within the individual
became overwhelmed and then collapsed. These ideas are reflected in
the work from Broadmoor on the ‘over controlled personality’. Arthur
Williams wrote many influential articles. His papers were collected
together in the book ‘Cruelty, Violence and Murder’, which I had the
good fortune to work on with him.

Williams was an active
participant, along with Leo Abse, on a committee working towards the
abolition of the death penalty. He firmly believed, on the basis of
his clinical experience, that even the most hardened criminals were
NOT beyond repair. Arthur chaired the London Clinic of
Psychoanalysis, a unique low-fee psychoanalytic treatment service,
which continues to this day. He was widely admired for his freedom
of thought and lack of subservience to any particular theoretical
doctrine.Less
well-known was the delicacy and insight of his writing on his
beloved poets - especially Keats and Coleridge. For now this is
sadly only available in French, but his short articles attest to a
depth of insight and knowledge of great poetry which, alongside the
beauties of his successive gardens, must have sustained him through
his darker areas of thought.
He will be remembered above all for his gift
of friendship across generations, the ever-present twinkle in his
eye and his lovely, ready sense of humour.